Abstract— The Purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of a dual head SPECT system having an array of pinholes as a collimator. Several analytical methods are used to evaluate the performance of the given pinhole array detector module design. Monte Carlo simulation studies using Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) validate the performance of this novel dual head SPECT where a cylindrical water phantom is imaged. We are proposing a pinhole array detector module with 48mm by 48mm of active area behind an array of 100 pinholes laid out in a 10 by 10 lattice. This configuration allows high detection efficiency and excellent sensitivity in SPECT imaging. The system is based on a pixelated array of NaI crystals (100 × 100 × 10mm elements) coupled with an array of position sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PSPMTs). The basic characteristics of this system were evaluated with pinhole apertures of 0.5mm, 1mm, 1.5mm, 2mm, 2.5mm and 3mm respectively. A conventional filtered back projection algorithm was used to reconstruct the images. Performance evaluation of this system indicates that high quality images can be obtained for in vivo imaging.
Index Terms— Dual head SPECT, SPECT instrumentation, pinhole SPECT and GATE.
The authors are with the School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW Australia, Canberra, Australia (e-mail: tasneem.rahman@student.adfa.edu.au, m.tahtali@adfa.edu.au, m.pickering@adfa.edu.au).
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Cite: Tasneem Rahman, Murat Tahtali, and Mark R. Pickering, " Design and Development of a High Performance Pinhole Array Dual Head SPECT Using Monte Carlo Simulation," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 305-310, 2015.
